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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5455083" data-attributes="member: 3887">In a similar way, it was determined-through-play in our 4e setting that it's currently fashionable for young ladies of means to wear jewelry made of extraordinarily flammable magnesium. Remember, you asked for this! (and I'll try to be brief...).World design is a form of fiction writing. You are creating the environment in which, in the case of D&D, fantasy adventure stories will take place. So I start with a few (hopefully) original ideas and a list of influences drawn from literature and film --and to a far lesser degree, actual history-- and hammer them into a loose framework. This usually works out to %5 inspiration, %5 perspiration, and %90 plagiarism... err... I mean synthesis. Next, I give some thought to how the game's conventions will inform the setting fiction: species diversity, class options, leveling and power-scaling, etc. My current design methodology is based on "working with the rules, not against them". I'm more interested in making published races/classes congruent and acceptable to my setting fiction than banning them or modifying their mechanics. My new motto is: leave the mechanics alone and concentrate on good fiction to drape over them. Next comes setting up the basic conflicts/drama. I don't really do metaplots, so this mean creating NPC's, usually with outlandish names, which the PC's can interact with using their choice of words or murder.Lastly, and I do mean lastly, I think about how specific elements of the setting fiction will get implemented using the game's mechanics, or, how I like to think of it, the part where I bash the lovely round peg of my creative noodling into the cold, ungrateful, square hole of the rules.(actually, it not all that bad...).When I use a (somewhat) rigid class-based system like D&D to run a game, I accept there's going to be a certain level of... dissociation between the game fiction and the game rules. Not every part of the fiction will be well-represented using the rules, if at all. And that's fine with me. Heck, the 2e era produced great setting despite their often flimsy mapping between the fiction and the rules. I appreciate more granular, toolbox systems like GURPS. It's nice to able to embody more of a setting's fictional elements using the actual game mechanics, rather than relying solely on handwaving and group consensus. In fact, before my 3e campaign went on hiatus, we converted it to M&M2e, partly because it did a better job at modeling those character in that world -- though that's probably because I consider mechanics last when I world-build!It's nice... but it's not required. A good setting has to be good fiction first. It has to be interesting enough to explore and ripe with/open to conflict. Without that, no amount of clever rules/fiction mapping will make the world worth playing in. (I so failed to be brief!)</blockquote>

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